Team Time Tracking – Hubstaff Staff Monitoring Software Review – 2019

Introduction Team Time Tracking

When picking a time tracking tool, it is important to comprehend the many different kinds of tools available. Tools such as Mavenlink, Wrike, and Zoho Projects all include robust time tracking features for professional services businesses. On the other hand, the time tracking features in these tools are available only within larger project management (PM) suites. Because of this, you are paying much more money for things like file storage, in-app chat, progress reports, and shift administration. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll find pure play time monitoring tools like Hubstaff (which begins at $5 a month per user) and TSheets, our Editors’ Choice tool for time tracking. Team Time Tracking

Characteristics and Usage

Hubstaff’s user interface (UI) is designed with a appealing left-rail blue navigation bar which leaves plenty of room around the right-hand side of your display for data entry and analysis. When you first log into the system, you’ll be taken to the main dashboard, which provides you an summary of how many hours your employees have worked this day and the number of hours they have worked over the past seven days. You will also find a list of every member, their latest jobs, and how active they’ve been over the last week. This is a solid PM data visualization which allows you instantly differentiate between workhorses and do-nothings, and it instantly calls to focus projects that are getting more than enough attention and jobs that are being neglected.

There are two ways to add time in Hubstaff: You can construct manual timesheets with previous hours worked, or you may use the stopwatch feature on Hubstaff’s native desktop app. Together with the timesheet attribute, you log in your hours since you probably did with pencil and paper through the analog age of time tracking. Basically, if you work your change, you add the time to your own timesheet, and you sign off on it. This is a pretty standard procedure of monitoring time. Regrettably, because Hubstaff doesn’t allow you to add future time, you can’t use the platform as a shift organizer. Administrators can let users manually edit previously submitted timesheets, and they can force users to need a reason to ensure they’re actually adding hours they worked. Admins may also set the system up to let users to start tracking time if they haven’t clocked to the system in a while.

The next, and most bothersome, way of monitoring moment in Hubstaff is by using the stopwatch feature. In each solution we tested, this element can be found within the confines of your web browserevery solution that is, except for Hubstaff. With Hubstaff, you are required to download an native desktop application that lives within a separate window. In it, you can choose your job, press Start, and your timer will begin counting. When you’re done, your activity and your screenshots will be sent to the main hub. The native app is going to take a photo at random intervals of up to three shots per hour based on how often the admin would like to spy on workers. Screenshots can be partially fuzzy to not capture sensitive information on every catch, but a lot of the display is left unsullied you’ll still get a feeling of whether the screen is really on work-related or play-related content. This can be an annoyingly complicated and complicated way to manually monitor time, particularly if you’re jumping from task to task throughout the day. Hubstaff must find a way to bring the stopwatch and screengrab elements to the cloud-based architecture to simplify ease of use.

Tracking time in real time on Hubstaff’s Android and iOS programs is exactly the same as it is on the desktop program. The mobile apps let admins monitor motions via GPS monitoring. This provides you an summary of how much motion was performed by your employee by capturing location data at different stages.

The Schedules tab enables you to assign times and dates for employees to work. It is possible to put a minimum number of hours to work, a lunch break duration, and you’ll be able to make it a recurring change. The tool’s reporting software is terribly basic: You will receive access to weekly, daily, project, and penis view reports in addition to a”custom” report which lets you filter information from the above reports. When compared to the PM solutions in this course, Hubstaff’s reporting is utterly embarrassing so, if your goal is to learn and evolve based on when and how your employees manage time, you’d be better off working with Zoho Projects, our Editors’ Choice for PM.

Admins receive notifications when they’ve reached weekly staffing and funding limits. Invoices are automatically calculated and created depending on the time each worker worked, in addition to his or her associated pay rate. It is possible to set up automatic payroll through PayPal, which enables you to automate payments based on time tracked inside the tool. Keep in mind: Users don’t have to send time through for acceptance, so automatic payments will be made whether employees were wrong or right concerning the number of hours that they worked. There is no reminder for supervisors to double-check each timesheet ahead of automatic payments move out so, if you are worried about making bogus payments, then it is possible to set PayPal payments to manual. Team Time Tracking

Price And Alternatives

Hubstaff has been built to provide you with Big Brother-level oversight into when employees are working, what they are doing while they work, and what you want to cover them as soon as the work is done. The Fundamental $5-per-month program gives you access to simple time tracking tools, a worker payment program manager, 24/7 support, and user preferences that can be managed on an employee-by-employee basis. Additionally, this plan enables you to keep track of whether or not your employees are working by allowing you record screenshots while they function in addition to monitor mouse and keyboard activity during shifts. Of the five tools we tested, Hubstaff is the only instrument which provided this level of insight into how workers are progressing. Although screen and keyboard monitoring are useful (albeit over-reaching) attributes for a change screen, Hubstaff’s implementation leaves much to be wanted (more on this later).

The 9-per-user-per-month Premium program includes everything you’ll discover in the Basic plan, but you will also get access to Hubstaff’s application programming interface (API) to integrate the application with other third-party applications. The Premium bundle also comes with a lightweight schedulingtool that provides administrators the capability to assign shifts and delegate tasks from inside the console. Premium customers may also use the application to make invoices and make PayPal payments mechanically. Clients that pay annually will receive two months free (for both price tiers).

In comparison to TSheets, its nearest competitor in our roundup, Hubstaff is fairly priced, especially given the added monitoring features that are unavailable in competitive resources. TSheets offers a fundamental free account, as well as a $4-per-user-per-month accounts that costs a $16 base fee per month for groups who have fewer than 100 users, and an $80 foundation fee per month for groups with more than a hundred users. The base fee, which Hubstaff doesn’t charge, makes TSheets marginally more costly than Hubstaff, even at Hubstaff’s Premium level.

If you’re more interested in these hulky PM alternatives, then you will want to pony up a little more money. Mavenlink’s cheapest plan that includes time monitoring costs $39 per user per month. Zoho’s cheapest time tracking plan is $25 per month for an infinite number of consumers (that is a pretty good deal if you want all of the excess PM attributes ). Wrike’s lowest time monitoring plan prices $24.80 per user per month.

What Should Be Added

Editor’s note: Since our first review of Hubstaff, the business has released a major upgrade in late 2018 that specifically addressed certain feature flaws or omissions, such as adding a web timer, fleshing out coverage options, and adding activity levels and monitor tracking. We are going to be analyzing these attributes shortly and you will see the results in an upcoming update to this review.

Aside from its draconian screengrab and keystroke tracking, Hubstaff does not do a very good job allowing for deeper change oversight. By way of instance, Hubstaff doesn’t allow advanced monitoring. If you operate a trucking business and you are less concerned about how many hours a trucker drove than the distance driven, then there’s no way to handle that in Hubstaff. Users may add notes to a empty text area, but that information won’t be mixed into accounts. This means that you can’t use it to learn about who is working, how they are working, and what they are generating (aside from the number of hours tracked). TSheets not only gives you this option, it provides you the ability to make six additional customizable innovative tracking fields. You can also add a question for every clock-out (i.e.,”Was there an incident? Yes. No.”) And the system forces the user to respond to the questions at the end of every change or else they will not have the ability to clock out.

As hardcore as Hubstaff is about tracking work, the application does not permit for IP address limitations, so your employees can say they’re working from the office but they can actually be working from a cruise ship in the Bahamas (unless they are using the cell app to monitor time). This is a standard feature that’s available in almost every other instrument we tested. Hubstaff also does not enable admins to require users to snap a photo if they report to work. I suppose it’s overkill to generate someone take a selfie right before you start recording their display and tracking their keystrokes, but TSheets lets you set this as a requirement (which makes sense, particularly if you’re monitoring tasks done outside of a computer, like electronic, building, or entertainment work). The program also doesn’t allow users clock via a telephone call, which is a component TSheets along with other service providers make available for workers who do not have a smartphone.

Tracking Employee Work

We have touched on how a number of Hubstaff’s more Big Brother-like features factor into time monitoring. However, the platform also offers a lot of the hallmarks of worker tracking tools. Hubstaff’s employee monitoring features include keystroke logging, URL and application monitoring, GPS and place monitoring, and action screenshots.

As soon as you set your customers and they download the timer app onto their machine, the desktop program not only monitors time but will require screenshots randomly or in custom intervals, for example three screenshots per minute. This applies not just to the user’s most important display but any attached monitors as well. Hubstaff doesn’t log keys however, it will track the activity provided via the mouse and keyboard, providing companies a calculation of how active the worker is. This info all winds up around the Hubstaff dashboard from the Activity tab. This is where you can then select a user in the drop-down menu to see their screenshots connected with activity data.

When it comes to program and URL tracking, Hubstaff goes beyond just tracking time to learn what websites and apps a worker visited or opened and how long they were there. The Reports module can then run custom queries on vectors such as program usage mapped against time and activity. Hubstaff incorporates with job and task management tools like Asana and Trello to filter reports from specific tasks or projects to track productivity.

One unique employee tracking feature offered is GPS location tracking through Hubstaff’s mobile app. While the mobile app can’t take screenshots or capture mobile app and website activity, it lets you monitor and log place for employees working in the field. While the depth of tracking data and surveillance features can’t step up to a powerhouse tool for example Teramind, our Editors’ Choice for employee monitoring, Hubstaff includes a useful choice of features for companies that want a little more oversight. Team Time Tracking

Summary

Hubstaff is an easy-to-administer, feature-rich, time monitoring tool. If you are diligent about monitoring employee behaviour while on the clock, then there’s no better program available than Hubstaff. You will be able to log screenshots, track keystroke volume, and route movements via GPS tracking.

Regrettably, if you’re trying to find a platform which goes the extra mile to enable customization, atypical data entry, or a more sophisticated reporting structure, then Hubstaff will not be right for you. Additionally, should you choose another system, your employees will thank you for not requiring them to download a secondary app for monitoring time–especially once you consider that every other tool we examined makes this potential within the confines of their online UI. Team Time Tracking